Blood in the Snow Film Fesitval 2016: 24×36 (2016) -Kevin Burke

The Blood in the Snow Film Festival gets underway this evening at the Yonge & Dundas Cineplex Theatre. Leading off the festival is a documentary that has been on my radar since its beginning, 24×36 – a movie about movie posters.

As anyone who has followed the blog knows, I, like a number of my cinema aficionados, love movie poster art, and I’ve even lamented the fact on this site before about the demise of poster art as it gave way to easily photoshopped marketing pieces.

The talking heads documentary, with some gorgeous art front and centre throughout celebrates the images created by Bob Peak, John Alvin, Drew Struzan, Roger Kastel and Richard Amsel, along with countless, and in some cases, sadly, nameless others.

The beauty of poster art changed with the introduction of photoshop, using star power to sell a movie, and suddenly we were in the era of the floating heads on posters.

The film follows on from there, and sees the rise of fan art, and just as importantly, the introduction of licensing to artists to create new, illustrated art to celebrate classic films (and sometimes new ones). The Mondo Tees company has garnered great acclaim with their fantastic posters (I have only two of them on hand, Jaws and E.T.), and other companies have also leapt in to fill this need for film art.

And that’s what these things truly are. Whether the film is any good or not, the posters for countless films are indeed art, and are slowly, finally, being recognised as such.

This was a fu and engaging documentary, though, in all honesty, it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know. It did, however, show me some gorgeous pieces that I hadn’t seen yet.

I take hope in the idea that illustrated poster art could be making a welcome return, and that we could (please, please, please) be moving away from the ridiculous and oft-repeated use of imagery, framing and set-up that seems to be the cheap and easy standard currently used to sell movies to the public.

This one is really worth checking out, and a great choice for an opening night film festival that is celebrating a love of genre cinema. It’s paired up with the goofy, but could have been played campier short, Ghost Can.

Check them out, and take a look at the other titles playing out between now and the 27th. You can find all the titles, and buy your tickets here.